Rich Snippets provide summarized information at a glance about specific searches. They draw the attention of users to relevant site pages by offering instant and concise details in result pages. In spite of their small stature or scale, they can be very handy to website publishers and webmasters. Including them within the source code lets Google make more sense of the webpages. Sites using this form of labeling system for their structured content will obviously enjoy greater visibility in SERPs.
It’s a key feature of the more user-friendly SERPs that help improve the search experience on the Web. This is why webmasters are encouraged by Google to mark up the content for providing structured information about relevant data. The search engine checks a website for marked-up content while crawling it. If it manages to grasp the content on site pages, it becomes practicable and possible to create rich snippets containing elaborate information aimed at helping users with specific queries. One for a restaurant, for example, might display the average review as well as price range; that for a recipe page would show the ingredients, preparation time, the recipe’s review rating etc.
We’ve grasped in an earlier post, it is important for marketers to include rich snippets on their sites since, only a text format looks boring. A lot of sites still do not use marked up data. And incorporating rich snippets in the subject matter can give them a competitive edge by bringing in a greater number of qualified target visitors. As Google accepts microdata, usage of rich snippets will call their attention to your web page thanks to relevant information to their query. Using them increases transparency between the author (his or her image, name and outgoing links to other articles being shown ) and users.
Intrinsic value of precise text nuggets
These search-driven snippets may seem nothing more than a few lines of innocuous text, which surface under each search result, but they carry a great value in terms of greater online visibility for search friendly sites, leading to increased conversions. For companies keen to leverage content and linkbait strategies, having mark up for authors being shown in the SERPs has added benefit thanks to AuthorRank.
For example, informational search (a ‘know’-based query), which displays an author with name, photo and a link to other articles can gradually build a sense of trust, authority and credibility. In another practical example, many ‘do’-based queries like visiting a concert can end up highlighting results from booking or ticket sites that have an instant snippet breakdown to assist them in online booking/ purchasing.
Rich snippets & structured data
Webmasters can help Google dig out relevant information by inserting additional HTML markup to site pages. This (markup) will help it recognize certain data types and display the same purposefully in rich snippets. As suggested in the previous post, your markup should match the broad requirements for each of the content types. Crosscheck for any missing tags or attributes, and verify that the information is in the proper format – microformats, microdata, or RDFa.
Once your rich snippets markup is properly added and tested, Google can discover it while crawling your site. For this to happen, it is mandatory to use the rich snippets testing tool so as to ensure that Google can properly parse the structured data markup and then show it in relevant search results. The search engine does support rich snippets for several content types like reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, and music. The search engine can recognize markup for video content as well and use it to further improve search results.
